Now he is championing the dangerous prospect of geo-engineering as his latest reason to ignore ballooning carbon emissions. Specifically he believes a fleet of 1,900 robotic ships patrolling the Pacific Ocean churning seawater into the upper atmosphere will negate the need to do anything about climate change.

Problem solved!

This loopy prospect emerged from the Copenhagen Consensus - Lomborg’s personal climate conference where hand-picked attendees parrot his fringe notion that climate change is simply to expensive to deal with. Real economists around the world have come to exactly the opposite conclusion.

And now Lomborg finds himself at odds with actual experts yet again. The same week he was courting press attention for his robot ship solution, a gathering of independent scientists was warning the world about the dangers of relying on geo-engineering instead of emission cuts.

“Playing with the Earth’s climate is a dangerous game with unclear rules,” said Robert Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change and organizer of a symposium on geo-engineering at theEcological Society of America’s Annual Meeting.

“We need more direct ways to tackle global warming, including energy efficiency, reduced consumption, and investment in renewable energy sources. The bigger the scale of the approach, the riskier it is for the environment,” said Jackson.

Strangely, Lomborg’s fleet of robotic ships was not even a topic of discussion at the symposium. Instead researchers focused on the more plausible idea of injecting huge amounts of sulfur particles and other aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight.

While most scientists caution that geo-engineering should only be considered as an emergency response to catastrophic climate change, it might provide temporary reductions in global temperatures. However, they also warn that solar radiation management schemes would do nothing to reduce the ballooning carbon load in the atmosphere or the impending death of coral reefs worldwide due to ocean acidification.

Monkeying around with the world’s thermostat can have other unintended consequences such as endangering the planet’s critically important ozone layer.

Another geo-engineering scheme involves dumping huge amounts of iron particles into the ocean to stimulate microbial uptake of carbon. The downside? Potentially enormous dead-zones where decay of phytoplankton blooms lead to oxygen-free ocean “deserts” that kill any marine life that swim into them. Researchers also warn that ocean fertilization schemes would only alleviate a fraction of the massive increase in atmospheric carbon from burning fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, in the faux ivory tower of the “Copenhagen Consensus”, Lomborg as usual is arguing that the only sensible course of action is to burn baby burn. His particular brand of celebrity and ignorance remains one of the most unhelpful voices in the urgent discussion of how to deal with climate change.

Previous Comments

Gwynn Dyer recently hosted a show called “Climate Wasr” on the CBC program ideas. It is very well worth listening to in any case as it takes the military perspective of climate change scenario building. However, what is worth mentioning particularly here is the discussion of geo-engineering and the future of global security as countries use global engineering without considerations of their international impact (no systems think is a larger pattern).

Here is the link: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/climate-wars/index.html

Of the scary geo-engineering options I have seen or heard about, the robot ships in the Pacific seem the most benign and most promising. And some option like that may (I REALLY hate to say it) prove necessary to counteract the positive feedbacks of, say, a collapse of Arctic ice and a sudden venting of methane from above and below the sea.
But these things will do nothing to slow down the acidification of the ocean - and they almost certainly will create unintended and unanticipated consequences - what Donald Rumsfeld used to call “the unknown unknowns.”
All we can really know for sure is that Lomborg is acting on behalf of energy interests, doing everything in his power to distract us from the main goal of reducing fossil fuel use.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.